UniCredit, Italy’s largest bank by assets, is preparing to offer crypto custody and brokerage services to clients, according to a Bloomberg report published Thursday. The Milan-based lender has been quietly building digital asset capability for more than a year, and the new services would put bitcoin and ether wallets alongside its traditional banking products for retail and wealth clients.
The bank has not announced a launch date. A spokesperson declined to comment on the report. People familiar with the plans told Bloomberg that the custody and brokerage stack is being developed internally, with the goal of letting clients buy, sell and store major cryptocurrencies through the same app they use for everyday banking.
A slow build, not a pivot
UniCredit’s move into crypto has been incremental rather than sudden. In December 2025 the bank structured Italy’s first minibond fully tokenized on a public blockchain, a 5 million euro issuance for the computing firm E4 Computer Engineering, done jointly with state lender Cassa Depositi e Prestiti. The bond was guaranteed 50 percent by SACE, Italy’s export credit agency, and subscribed in equal parts by UniCredit and CDP. In April it took a roughly 16 percent stake in BlockInvest, an Italian tokenization startup, for 4 million euros, a deal that valued the company at about 25 million euros. Crédit Agricole also holds a stake in the startup.
Those projects live in the fixed income world. Adding retail crypto custody and brokerage is a different kind of commitment, because it puts the bank directly in front of consumers buying volatile assets. It also drags in strict liability rules. Under the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, which took full effect at the end of 2024, custodians are responsible for losses on client assets in most circumstances, a standard far harsher than the one applying to securities accounts. That liability is one reason several European banks spent 2025 piloting custody for institutional clients first and only later extended it to retail.
European banks are piling in
UniCredit is not moving alone. In September 2025 it joined a consortium of nine European banks, including ING, Danske Bank, KBC, CaixaBank, SEB, DekaBank and Raiffeisen Bank International, that plans to issue a MiCAR-compliant euro stablecoin in the second half of 2026. The group formed a Dutch company for the project and is seeking an e-money license from the Dutch central bank. The stated aim is a European alternative to dollar-denominated stablecoins, which currently dominate settlement on public blockchains.
Other large European institutions have already crossed the custody line. Deutsche Bank has been building a digital asset custody platform with the Swiss firm Taurus. Santander and BBVA offer crypto trading in Switzerland, where the rules are more settled. DekaBank, the German asset manager, launched crypto custody for institutional clients in 2024. Italian banks have so far been more cautious, partly because Consob and the Bank of Italy took longer to publish their interpretation of MiCA and the national FinTech Decree that governs tokenized instruments.
The commercial logic is straightforward. European clients have been buying crypto through exchanges and paying little attention to where the assets sit. Banks want that flow back, and they want the fee income that comes with it. Andrea Orcel, UniCredit’s chief executive, has repeatedly said the bank should follow clients into regulated digital assets rather than watch them leave for unregulated platforms. The bank serves roughly 15 million clients across Italy, Germany, Austria and Central and Eastern Europe, which makes even a modest adoption rate meaningful in volume terms.
What it means for the market
If UniCredit ships the product, it would become the first major Italian bank to offer direct crypto brokerage, a notable signal in a country where retail crypto adoption is high but bank participation has been near zero. Borsa Italiana’s parent group Euronext has experimented with tokenized settlement, and Banca Sella has piloted digital asset services, but no large Italian retail bank currently lets customers hold coins in-house.
The competitive question is pricing. Bank custody will almost certainly cost more than an exchange account. What banks can offer in exchange is recovery: if the platform fails or a client loses access, there is a regulated entity with a complaints process and deposit-style expectations behind it. That trade-off has kept a portion of wealthy European clients on the sidelines, and it is exactly the segment UniCredit’s wealth management arm wants to capture.
There is also a security angle. Exchange hacks and failed lenders such as FTX left a lasting mark on European regulators, and MiCA’s custody rules were written in direct response. A bank with a century-old balance sheet entering the market gives supervisors a test case: if custody works inside a bank’s risk framework, expect others to follow quickly, and if it stumbles, the whole sector slows down.
Regulatory timing matters too. The ECB has been running infrastructure pilots for wholesale blockchain settlement under the Pontes and Appia projects, and Brussels has signaled it wants Europe to compete with the United States and Singapore on tokenized finance. A large Italian bank offering custody gives policymakers a working example to point to, which in turn tends to speed up approvals for the next bank in line.
UniCredit shares closed little changed in Milan on Thursday. The bank reports third quarter results in November, which may be the first chance management gets to address the plans publicly. Until then, the market is left reading a Bloomberg scoop and a trail of small, deliberate steps the bank has taken since late 2025.